


May Contain Multitudes

by thisbluespirit



Category: Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Community: who_contest, Gen, Multi-Era, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-24
Updated: 2019-02-24
Packaged: 2019-11-04 20:36:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17905190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisbluespirit/pseuds/thisbluespirit
Summary: Three's a crowd, but it could be worse, as the Doctor finds out...





	May Contain Multitudes

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the who_contest challenge "Crowds."

“Whoops,” said the Doctor. 

He slid out from under the console, and then winced as the TARDIS rippled and flexed before stabilizing enough for him to risk standing up and checking the controls. This kind of thing had never happened before when he’d tried to fix the navigations circuits. Well, almost never. It was probably the fault of the randomizer he’d plugged in during his last regeneration – it had never worked well, even before he’d kept overriding it. Of course, if it hadn’t been for the need to get a certain air stewardess back to Heathrow, he wouldn’t have been worrying about it now, so he also (perhaps a little unfairly) blamed said air stewardess. But Tegan wanted to go home, and three was a crowd when it came to travelling companions, it was true.

The console room still had a hazy edge to the corners of it, and he could tell from the tingling in his head that whatever temporal problem he’d caused wasn’t over yet, so it wasn’t as much of a shock as it should have been when a short, fair-haired girl poked her head in through the inner door.

“Gosh,” she said. “You’ve redecorated. It’s a bit Spartan, isn’t it?” And then, as she looked at the Doctor properly, squinting as if he was out of focus. “You’re not the Doctor! Who are you?”

Before he could explain that he was, indeed, very much the Doctor, she wavered and vanished and was replaced by a red-head who was shouting something about bunk-beds, improbable as that seemed. She had time to stop and blink, but not to ask questions, before she also rippled out of his time zone.

Future companions, he surmised, and wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

“Hey, Professor,” said someone from beside him, who then stepped back abruptly, before giving him a dark glare. “Have you done something to the Professor?”

The Doctor was beginning to realise that if three had seemed like a crowd, that was nothing to how it felt when all of the TARDIS’s past and future occupants were invading his space.

“I had better fix this,” he said, and crawled back under the console, pulling out the mess of wiring. “Now, where did I go wrong?”

“Hey gorgeous,” said someone unexpectedly lying on the floor next to him.

The Doctor jumped, nearly hitting his head on the console. “Now, look here,” he began, but the dashing matinee idol sort gave him a wide, definitely suggestive grin and a wink before fading away as the others had done.

“Why don’t you just admit that you can’t control the TARDIS?” said a voice from above him that was, unlike the others, familiar. The Doctor froze, a wire in each hand at the sound of that Scottish accent. _Jamie._

“Yes,” added another, equally painfully familiar voice, “and let me have a go. I’m sure I could work out what’s preventing you from piloting the ship properly in no time at all.”

“No!” his past self said, and then, in a different tone, “Wait, Jamie, Zoë – there’s someone in here, meddling with my TARDIS!” 

The Doctor affixed one wire to the other and the entire room wobbled again, before finally stabilizing. He waited, but nothing else happened, and no one else appeared, whether ghost from the past or future, so he breathed out in relief, and extricated himself from the TARDIS’s inner workings.

“Well, that seems to be that, thank goodness,” he announced to the empty room as he got back to his feet, before turning to find a gleaming, sharp knife pointed at his nose. “Ah. Evidently not.”

“Who are you?” said Leela. “What are you doing in here? If you do not explain yourself immediately, I shall cut out your heart!”

“Oh, dear,” he said. Definitely not fixed yet. “I’m sorry, Leela, all my fault – I’ll put it right in a trice – no need to stab anyone!”

Her repeated, softer, more puzzled, “Who are you?” echoed after she, too, had vanished like the others.

“Right,” said the Doctor. “ _Not_ that connection, then. It must have been the other wire.”

He tried again.

 

The console room suddenly seemed unusually peaceful now that time wasn’t folding in on itself. The navigation system was still shot, reducing his chances of hitting 1980s Heathrow in the immediate future unless by accident, but after all, three companions were fine – just right, really. The Doctor went in search of them. It was rather surprising that none of them had come to ask what was going on, and he hardly wanted to find he’d accidentally left one of them in a previous or future TARDIS. That would never do. 

Tegan was already marching down the white corridor towards him. She stopped, facing him, put her hands on her hips, glared upwards and said, “Did you just do something to the TARDIS? I was stuck on one side of my bedroom for half an hour! If this is some kind of joke –”

“No joke, Tegan. A near disaster, but averted now. Everything should be completely back to normal.”

One of the roundels fell off the wall beside him.

Tegan looked down at it, and then back up at him. She raised an eyebrow, a distinctly amused glint in her eyes. “So I see, Doctor. Exactly as usual!”

 

Having left Tegan to go and check on Nyssa, he slipped back into the console room, where he found Adric down on his hands and knees by the console.

“Adric,” he said, repressing instant irritation. “Not now! The TARDIS is a little delicate at the moment – er, what _are_ you doing?”

Adric straightened up and bit into a custard cream he was holding. He waved the remaining half of it about. “Looking for more of these.”

“And why would you think there would be custard creams in the middle of the TARDIS’s inner workings?”

Adric shrugged and ate the rest of his biscuit. “Well, that’s where I found this one,” he said through his mouthful.

“Doctor.”

The Doctor turned, glad of the interruption. It was Nyssa, after all. He could rely on Nyssa to be reasonable about things, even if ‘things’ included a near miss on fatally mangling the timeline on his part.

“What just happened?”

The Doctor gave her an uneasy look and reappraised the situation. Nyssa was far from her usual impeccable self: liquid was dripping from her hair and velvet jacket while she had smudges on her cheek and nose and the end of her sleeve appeared to be singed.

“I, er, may have caused a brief temporal anomaly,” he said, at his most airily cheerful. “Nothing to worry about – I fixed it almost immediately, of course.”

Nyssa stared back at him. “Oh, _Doctor_! I was in the middle of a sensitive experiment. You’ve ruined the entire synthesization process!”

“Yes, well,” he said, and coughed. “Sorry about that. How about I take you all somewhere nice to make up for it?”

“Sounds great,” said Tegan, coming in the door behind him. “I can tell you one thing, though – it won’t be Heathrow, that’s for sure. You can’t steer this thing for toffee, Doctor.”

“TARDIS travel _is_ more of a mystery tour. But that is the fun of it, you know.”

Tegan grinned. “You said it. Still, after that scare, I wouldn’t mind seeing some of the sights of the universe you keep going on about.” She squeezed Nyssa’s least soggy arm, and said, giving her friend a sympathetic look, “After we get Nyssa cleaned up, of course.”

“How about somewhere with more of these?” Adric said, holding up yet another temporally displaced custard cream.

“Oh, I think I can do better than that,” said the Doctor, and pulled down the dematerialisation lever, a smile lighting his face. He knew just the place, if the old girl would only oblige… 

He _would_ get Tegan back to Heathrow, of course. One day. Soon. But in the meantime, three wasn’t a bad number at all, now that he came to think about it. It might even be better than two – and it was certainly better than the multitudes of infinity.


End file.
